State of DevOps and CD

High performing DevOps teams have a significant competitive advantage.

The 2016 State of DevOps Report put out by PuppetLabs and DORA showed that high performers dominate their markets and obliterate their competitors. Does that sound a bit dramatic?

They are able to take ideas to market 200 times more frequently, creating a high-speed vehicle for saving the best ideas and tossing the losing ideas out quickly.

They deploy new services and products 2,555 times faster. While their competition is still thinking about maybe possibly perhaps deploying a new capability, high-performers have already moved from concept to cash.

High-performers recover from issues 24 times faster. Given the vast array of options available to clients at the click of a button and the costs associated with losing customers and trying to win new customers, resilience is a significant competitive differentiator.

And, not only are they able to recover more quickly, but high-performers have a failure rate that is 3x lower than that of others.

Given those statistics, it seems that companies that don’t modernize their software development approach will—at some point—no longer be able to compete.

High-performing DevOps statistics can be inspirational…or depressing.

Some organizations looking at the PuppetLabs statistics find inspiration and motivation. They are already on a path of continuous improvement and are evolving to be the best that they can possibly be. However, for other software development executives, the PuppetLabs DevOps statistics can be daunting and very depressing, particularly where their:

Release cycles currently take weeks or longer

Every request for change is met with fear and resistance due to software fragility and technical debt

Unit tests and automated tests are just a twinkle in someone’s eye

Development, testing and IT operations are still living in silos

Developers are working on complex, legacy solutions created by developers who have long since left the company

There’s a strong culture of change-aversion and risk-aversion impacting teams’ ability to increase their agility

Is it too late to compete?

The other day, I was asked if it was too late for an organization to transform their software development approach to win in the market. While every situation is different, we can look at the landscape today for a bit of uplifting news. It helps to consider the extent to which software development teams are embracing DevOps and Continuous Deployment. According to the 2016 VersionOne State of Agile Report, only 50% of teams today use continuous integration, only 28% use automated acceptance testing and only 27% engage in continuous deployment.

If those statistics are a reflection on reality and those three practices are representative of high-performing teams, there seems to be plenty of opportunity to evaluate current state, consider where you want to be and to engaging in a continuous improvement plan that enable you to achieve your goals.